Friday, September 3, 2010

Work harder, not smarter


Here's another one: 'work smarter, not harder!'

I hope you've never used this one in a misguided attempt to motivate a subordinate. If you have, you've just told the employee they're dumb. Not very motivational, eh?

Personally, I don't think employees are dumb (and if you have one, how did they get hired in the first place? And in the second place, why are they still with you?).In fact, I think most employees, unless they've been so totally mismanaged that they're completely disengaged, actually try to find the best way of doing things. Simply exhorting 'smarter' work is not likely to get results...

On the other hand, employees may may lack experience in how to get things done, and for that, an effective leader can help them think through options and work plans. But that also requires a real commitment - and real work - on the part of the manager or executive. If the leader puts in the effort, I can almost guarantee the results will be remarkable.

So, if you work harder, your employees will work smarter.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions


Who hasn't heard at one time during their career, from a boss, 'don't bring me problems, bring me a solution?'

How silly is this? If all your boss does is ratify a solution, what good is s/he? Further, if you have a solution, why the heck aren't you out there implementing it?

Worse,what does this say about the organization that encourages this sort of behavior? That they don't trust their people? That they are so risk averse that no one is encouraged to make a move because of fears of making mistakes? Think about what this does to  employee motivation and engagement.

Instead, try telling your employees to stop bringing you solutions, and bring you problems instead.
They'll be skeptical at first, but if you're firm in telling them 'if you already know what to do, why are you asking me for permission?', they'll get the message pretty quickly. You'll soon be amazed at changes in attitudes and increased energy levels.

And you'll probably find that your job becomes a lot more interesting as well - the good ones are not going to bother you with trivia (and if they're not good, why are they still working for you?) and the problems they bring you are likely to be really interesting - helping solve those will have a real impact.

Sunday, July 25, 2010




My parents, who both grew up in the depression, instilled two values in me: hard work, and thrift. While we never felt we wanted for much growing up, there was never a lot of money to spend either, something we were blissfully unaware of. One thing I remember is mom cooking healthy dinners every night, using fresh ingredients bought daily from the supermarket. She was a good bargain hunter, and knew how to stretch her food dollar. We'd splurge occasionally on a hamburger out at the local A&W (remember those?), washed down with a root beer float.

Thus, I was struck by a vignette early on in the film Food, Inc., where a working family of four stops by a fast food restaurant for a dollar meal. The mother explains that because they are so busy, she doesn't really have time to cook, but she does want to make sure her children get a 'good' meal to start the day... She goes on to say that because they don't have a lot of money, they have to look for bargain ways to feed their family. But then we find that the father is suffering from diabetes, for which he is spending $200 a month on prescription medicine...

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Life or death communications: lessons from Lord Nelson



Lord Horatio Nelson
For several decades now, I've been a student, observer and participator in strategy (corporate, branding and marketing) and organization - getting these right is, of course, critical to success. But I've seen many cases where carefully prepared plans and their support structures have not resulted in the desired results.

Reading To Rule the Waves, a gripping history by Arthur Herman, I was struck by the role communications played in two Royal Navy engagements, 25 years apart, each of immense strategic consequences: Yorktown in 1781 and Trafalgar in 1805.
Communications dictated the outcome of each, one a failure that lost a continent and one a victory that established naval pre-eminence for more than a century. The lesson: everyone in the organization must understand what needs to be done for a plan to be successfully executed.
Trapped by the French fleet

Yorktown

In late 1781, "a British army under General Cornwallis had been driven back across Virginia to Yorktown at the mouth of the James River. A French squadron of 26 ships of the line under Admiral de Grasse had cut off Cornwallis. The North American [British] squadron under its new commander Thomas Graves had come down into the Chesapeake Bay to drive de Grasse away; at Virginia's Cape Henry the fleets joined battle on September 5."

It was a fight the British should have won. Grave's subordinate, Samuel Hood, wrote to [Lord] Sandwich, 'Yesterday the British fleet had a rich and most delightful harvest of glory presented to it, but omitted to gather it." Instead, a confusion of signals (Graves had run up the signal for close action at the same time as the flag for keeping the line of battle), and de Grasses's skill in avoiding a more decisive engagement cost Graves the battle and sent him back to New York. By the time he returned, Cornwallis had surrendered. The American War of Independence had been won and lost."

Within a decade, however, the British Navy would introduce a new communications system so revolutionary that it would change the way naval battles were fought, and result in a victory so decisive that Britain would would dominate the world's oceans for over a century.

Historically, admirals could communicate with their captains by the placement and color of flags raised and lowered from the flagship's (hence the name...) masts. Unfortunately, the captains couldn't communicate back and, worse, the admiral couldn't change plans in the heat of the battle. That changed in 1790, when

Richard Howe introduced a new numerical system for signalling his captains, with 10 flags of standard pattern and color (the basis of the International Code of signals still used by ships today). They could now be used in combination to form more than 260 separate messages, from the admiral to his ships but also now from his ships to the admiral. There was even a signal for telling the admiral his signal had been seen and understood, resolving a confusion that had plagued every naval commander since the Spanish Armada - and which had lost Britain the battle of the Chesapeake, and the American Revolution.

Trafalgar

The Treaty of Amiens, signed in 1802, had two results: it ended the the hostilities between France and Britain during the French revolutionary war and, more importantly, made Napolean the military master of the continent of Europe. Only Britain stood in the way of his perceived destiny.

So when, inevitably, war with Britain resumed in May 1803 (the pretext was Britain's refusal to evacuate Malta as promised), Napolean focused his energies on the achievement that had eluded everyone since William the Conqueror: the invasion and defeat of Britain...Like Philip II two centuries earlier, he summoned all the resources of his continental empire. Napolean assembled at Boulogne the battle-hardend veterans of a dozen campaigns into a force of 160,000 men, which he dubbed the Grand Army. He poured over maps and chose the location for his beachhead lading: the northeast coast between Deal and Ramsgate, where his invasion force could anchor in the Downs in the shelter of the Goodwin Sands. He had his engineers design special boats that could get across the Channel in a dead calm.

HMS Victory at Trafalgar
The only obstacle was the Royal Navy, and in particular the Mediterranean fleet under the command of Horatio Nelson, and his flagship, Victory, which would become the most famous man-of-war in British history.  His goal was "'to keep the French fleet in check, and if they out to see, annihilate him.' To do this, Nelson would use a new kind of blockade, not close but loose - so loose, in fact, that it might tempt the French to break out and then fall into his trap. He had a tool to help him: the new navy signals." By 1799 the Admiralty had adopted and expanded the system to more than 340 messages, giving an admiral unprecedented tactical control.

Over the next two years, British and French naval forces played a game of cat and mouse in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Caribbean, each trying to gain an advantage that would seriously cripple the other. In September 1805, Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, commander of Napolean's fleet, was preparing to go to sea from Cadiz, Spain to try to secure the English Channel when an order arrived from Napolean: his enemies were gathering in central Europe and the fleet now needed to return to the Mediterranean to land troops and supplies in Naples. As the French fleet set sail on October 19,

The [British] frigate Sirius was the first to spot them. It immediately sent the news on to Blackwood's Eurylalus [using 26 flags: 'To Eurayalus: Enemy have their topsails hoisted.'...which] relayed the message on to the next frigate, the Phoebe, and so on until it reached the Mars 48 miles away. Lt. William Cumby of the Bellerophon then caught the Mars signal; his captain was planning to dine with Nelson on the Victory that very morning. Now Captain Cooke had more exciting news to pass on to his commander in chief: the French were coming.

Two days later, the enemy fleets engaged and the British won a decisive victory that, in their minds, buried any chance of Napolean's invasion of England, even though it was later learned that he had called off the invasion. However, the victory did ensure that Britain would remain unchallenged as it established control of the oceans for the better part of the next century. While tactics, bravery and luck - good and bad: Nelson lost his life - played an important role, as in any armed conflict, the ability of the British fleet to act swiftly on intelligence that would not have been able to be communicated a decade before was crucial.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The next great technological revolution


I continue to be fascinated by Carlota Perez’ work on Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. Briefly, she identifies 50 or so year periods of great economic advancement, followed by a bust which then creates the conditions for a period of steady growth and prosperity; each period goes through five phases:
1. Irruption, which inaugurates the surge through a technological big bang in a world threatened by stagnation and inflames the imagination of young entrepreneurs

2. Frenzy, a time of new millionaires, when financial capital takes over; the rich get richer at the expense of the poor (Engels works were inspired in this phase in the 1840s)

3. The turning point, generally a ‘panic’ or a crash, a time of fundamental changes required to move the economy from the Frenzy mode

4. Synergy, often a true golden age if the framework created during the turning point creates the conditions for a sustained build out

5. Maturity – gradual saturation of markets creating the conditions of the next irruption; those who reaped the full benefits of the golden age hold on to their beliefs in a complacent blindness in the face of increasing dissatisfaction and frustration

Here are Perez’ five great technological revolutions:

The industrial revolution, which she dates from 1771 when Arkwright’s mill opens in Cromford, Britain; turning point 1793-1797
The age of steam and railways, dating from the test of the ‘Rocket’ steam engine for the Liverpool-Manchester railway in 1829; turning point 1848-1850
The age of steel, electricity and heavy engineering, starting with the opening of the Carnegie Bessemer steel plant in Pittsburgh; turning point 1893-1895
The age of oil, the automobile and mass production when the first Model T rolls off the assembly line in Detroit; turning points: Europe, 1929-1933; US 1929-1943
The age of information and telecommunications, with the quiet announcement (at the time) of the Intel microprocessor in Santa Clara; turning point 2001 - ????

The intriguing element of her work is her investigation of how a new technology, often misunderstood at the time, launches a sequence of events that over time gather steam (OK, that was intentional…) and eventually create whole new industries and economic structures completely beyond the power of the inventor to envision. She writes:

“Each technological revolution results from the synergistic interdependence of a group of industries with one or more infrastructural networks…The technologies and products involved are not only those where the major breakthroughs have occurred. It is often the interlinking of some of the new and some of the old that generates the revolutionary potential. In fact, many of the products and industries coming together into the new constellation had already existed for some time, either in a relatively minor economic role or as important complements for the prevailing industries.

"This was the case of coal and iron which after a long history of usage during and before the Industrial Revolution, were transformed by the steam engine into the motive industries of the Age of Railways. Oil was developed for many uses since the 1880s by an extremely active industry; the same can be said about the internal combustion engine and for the automobile, which was produced as a luxury vehicle for quite some time. But it is the conjunction of all three with mass production that makes them become part of a veritable revolution.

"Electronics existed since the early 1900s and in some ways was crucial in the 1920s; transistors, semiconductors, computers and controls were already important technologies in the 1960s and even earlier. Yet it is only in 1971, with the microprocessor that the vast new potential of cheap microelectronics is made visible; the notion of a ‘computer on a chip’ flares the imagination and all the related technologies of the information that come together into a powerful cluster.”

I'm desparately trying to determine what the next technology constellation is - what are your thoughts?